Do sufficient research to identify potential customers who appear to need your product. This means pulling together names, addresses, and telephone numbers of companies in your market area that use the types of products you are trying to sell. Calling on companies that do not use your products only wastes time, energy, and money.

Get the name, address, and telephone number of the specific individual responsible for purchasing the types of products you are selling. It won’t do much good to talk to the marketing manager if you’re trying to sell computer programs, or the general manager if you’re selling machine tools.

Know your sales pitch before calling. No one has time to chit-chat about superfluous subjects. No one cares about how you feel, nor do they care to tell you how they feel. One sentence describing your product and why the listener should buy it is all you’ve time for. If you continue beyond one sentence, either you’ll be thrown out or you’ll lose the interest of your potential customer. When buyers want to hear more, they ask questions. If there are no questions, there’s no interest.

Don’t attempt to close an order at the first contact—either by phone or in person. If the person is interested, ask what would be convenient time and place for you to return and elaborate on your product offering, including prices, delivery schedules, and quality guarantees.

Focus on the benefits to be gained from using your product, not on its price. Explanations of product pricing and delivery options should wait for second contact. If you’re forced to the wall, try to keep your description of your pricing structure general.

Follow up all potential leads with another call, a letter, or a sample of your product. The scret to building a first-stage business base through direct sales is to continually follow up with any potential customer that seems the least bit interested in your product.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Social interactions establish the role that people play in a society and their authority responsibility pattern. Their roles and patterns are supported by a society’s institutional framework, which includes, for example, education and marriage.

Social roles are established by culture. For example, a woman can be a wife, a mother, a community leader, and/or an employee. What role is preferred in different situations is culture-bound. Most Swiss women consider household work as their primary role. For this reason, they resent modern gadgets and machines. Behavior also emerges from culture in the form of conventions, rituals, and practices on different occasions such as during festivals, marriages, get-togethers, and times of grief or religious celebration.

With reference to marketing, the social interactions influence family decision-making and buying behavior and define the scope of personal influence and opinion. In Latin America and Asia the extended family is considered the most basic and stable unit of social organization. It is the center for all economic, political, social, and religious life. It provides companionship, protection, and a common set of values with specifically prescribed means for fulfilling them. By contrast, in the US the nuclear family (husband, wife, and children) is the focus of social organization. The US wife plays a more autonomous role than the Dutch wife in family decision-making. Thus social roles vary from culture to culture and are likely to affect marketing behavior.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

A firm’s ability to profit from its competences is a function of how core the competences are, and the extent to which competitors can quickly acquire such competences. The profits come from the low cost or differentiated products that the firm can make as a result of having the inimitable core competences. If a competence is non-core and inimitability is high, then one may not be able to make profits from it, all else being equal. If it is non-core but inimitable, the firm may be able to make some negligible profits, from it. If however the competence is core but easily imitated, the firm can make some profits, but these will only be temporary as competitors will have time to imitate. If the acceptance is core and inimitable, then the firm can make long-term profits.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Winning companies realize the strategic value of building successful partnerships. While all companies experience periods of highs, lows, and transitions in their respective performance and in stock prices, truly successful companies build lasting partnerships that sustain and provide long term value to all partners, employees, and shareholders.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Retailing implies activities involved in the sale of goods and services to the consumers for their personal, family and household use. That’s about marketing activities designed to provide satisfaction to the final consumer and profitability maintain these customers through a program of continuous quality improvement. The scope of retailing, therefore, is defined as activities aimed at satisfying the final consumer profitability. This win-win situation is achieved through different activities the retailers provide both to the consumers as well as the manufacturers.

While the basic objective of retailing would remain the same in all countries, the retail environment in developed countries would be vastly different, and hence not conducive to adopting similar marketing practices.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Any group possessing common goals is an organization. But business organizations can be classified according to the nature of their internal authority relationships. Although there are five forms of organization structure, four forms are common: line, line and staff, committee, and matrix. The line structure is the oldest form and is frequently used today in smaller organizations. The functional form uses specialist managers entirely responsible for their own fields within the operation. The line and staff form uses specialists to assist line officers. This is commonly used in medium and large size firm. The fourth and fifth types, committees and the matrix organizations exist in many firms but only ready as the sole types. They are typically used as a sub-organizational form within a line and staff structure.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.